With the development of wireless communication technology, requirements of users on wireless services increasingly become higher. The long term evolution (LTE) technology emerges in order to meet the requirements for faster service transmission, shorter delay, and broader bands.
As the evolution of the Third Generation (3G) technology, the LTE improves and strengthens a 3G air access technology. The future network operating environment will be increasingly complicated with the deployment of LTE networks. The key factors for lowering the networking price are to improve a spectrum utilization rate, simplify the network structure, provide wireless base stations with lower cost, and enhance the maintainability function.
As a technology capable of raising the network automation level and system efficiency and reducing the operating cost, a self-organizing network (SON) has the following characteristics. The network has high degree of intelligence, has good reconfigurability, flexibility, and self-organization, is configured to meet communication requirements in different environments and of different customers, and is a highly autonomous and adaptive network.
As an important feature of the SON network, load balancing (LB) strives for a balanced distribution of a traffic load among different networks, so as to increase a capacity of the network, improve a success rate of user access, and reduce access delay.